Clinical Suspicion: The Affective Politics of Institutional Growth in a Rajasthani Clinic

By tracing the growth and expansion of a clinic in a small Dalit and Adivasi community in rural Rajasthan, this paper describes the felt incongruences of developmental progress. It engages critical social science literatures about development’s linear narrative form and its potential for technological depoliticisation, to show that even as institutions grow, politics persist around what a developed health system should do. It tracks suspicion as a durable affective infrastructure alongside the clinic’s changing material one to trace the politics, promises and demands for development among India’s rural poor. It argues that state affects and infrastructures provide an important perspective on development in South Asia and shows how a politics of population care is experienced and enacted by those imagined as the governed. It provides a lens on the everyday entanglement of caste, gender and indigeneity in development politics.